Forcing antiquated, uninteresting books on captive teenagers leaves such a bad taste in the mouth as to ensure that most of them will never pick up a book again.
I disagree -- "classics" are called "classics" because there is a core body of literature that every educated person MUST know. Shakespeare is woven into the fabric of the English language, the best playwright of the age that wrote the most beautiful English ever produced (they also brought you the King James Bible.) Dickens and Hardy each illuminate a time and a place in English history. Like it or not, that is important. Tolstoy is essential to understanding the Russia of his age (just as I would submit you can't understand the 19th c. French without Stendhal and Dumas).
And teenagers are not the best judges of what is meritorious reading. My daughter thought she was going to hate Paradise Lost . . . once she got through the first book, she was hooked. She also didn't care for All the Kings' Men at first, but changed her mind about half way through. (We both still hate Catcher in the Rye, but that's one you have to read to get the flavor of a particularly depressing period in modern American literature.)
Having read a classic once doesn't make one educated. A book you didn't want to read leaves your head the day the assignment is done and you will never consider it again - or consider reading it again either.
Teenagers may not be good judges of merit, but they are great judges of what they don't like. Forcing meritorious art that they hate "for their own good" today at the expense of turning them off literature forever afterwards is not a win for education.